SUSE 9.1 FTP Version Available

twener writes "The SUSE 9.1 FTP version is now available on SUSE's ftp mirrors for free installation via FTP/HTTP (installation instruction). It's almost identical to SUSE 9.1 Professional except some few packages which are missing due to licence reasons. Also don't miss "SUSE 9.1: The Complete Review" recently published by DesktopOS.com."

ok..

[Anonymous Coward]

so is it Suse, silent 'e'? Or SusEE or SusAY? or what??

SuSE

[clymere]

That would explain why last week i downloaded their FTP install boot disk and was unable to get it to work.

In the meantime I've installed Slackware instead...and much more atisfied with that then I was with SuSE 8.2.

My experience so far has been that RPM-based distros like SuSE and Red Hat that attempt to simplify dependency problems with propreitary upgrade tools inevitably just end up causing me much more frustration. SuSE had NO provision for getting software other than what was in the version I'd installed(8.2) and wouldn't even install apt4rpm due to dependency hell. I've found installing and upgrading new software in Slackware a 1000x simpler than any RPM.

I will attest to Yast being a nice tool, that was easy to use, and did a pretty good job of detecting my hardware. But the complications in upgrading individual packages in a registered copy of their distro proved too frustrating to justify sticking with it.

I would only reccomend SuSE to a newbie who has no desire for messing around with things once its installed, and just wants it to work reasonably well from the beginning.

Re:Suse is not free

[kjj]

This raises an interesting question. Can unofficial ISOs now be distributed since YaST is no longer encumbered? I remember that vendors like Cheapbytes and other CD burning houses were not able to sell SuSE as an unoffical CD since ironically enough the license on YaST forbid anyone but SuSE for charging for the software. Now with this restriction gone couldn't vendors just master there own unoffical CD's from the FTP packages. I believe that Cheapbytes has already done this with OpenBSD since they can't use his copyrighted ISO layout.

Re:SuSE

[clymere]

i didn't say i was smart, i just said that explained my problem :)
I'm not sure about the apt4rpm myself, i read up on all its required dependencies, and downloaded and installed each thing in proper order. At a certain point each one i started getting conflicting dependencies...ugh.
I was only trying SuSE because i'd gotten a free version of SuSE 8.2 complete with registration, and figured it was worth a shot. Some of my problems are undoubtedly due my not being a regular user of the distro. Generally speaking however, I've found Slackware much easier to work with then SuSE or Red Hat...and I am very much a newbie, crossing over from a lifetime of Windows use.
Some of these tools just seem to be the antithesis of what i switched to Linux for in the first place: choice. If all i wanted was a system to make decisions for me...well i've got a windows box for that :)

Lets see you do that for hundreds of systems

[leereyno]

I work for the Fulton school of engineering at Arizona State University. There are several hundred Linux systems here, and I support almost all of them in one way or another. I've had people try to tell me that we should be using Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, and even FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Sometimes this advice is based upon some genuine technical reason but all too often it is based upon ideology, especially where Debian is concerned. I'm sorry, but I'm not going to use a distro just because it follows the FSF/GNU flavor of political correctness. The day the unix world chooses ideology over technology is the day we are doomed.

The distributions we encourage our customers to use are Redhat/Fedora because this distro family is easy to support. Those other distros may or may not have real (technical) advantages over Redhat, but none of them scale as well as Redhat does. SuSE may scale equally well but due to Redhat's popularity we simply haven't had much call to try and work on SuSE systems. If Fedora proves to be unstable we may switch to SuSE, especially if it becomes more popular than Fedora.

The reason why we push Redhat/Fedora and not some other distro is because we don't want to have to install packages by hand or compile stuff from source all the time. Hand installs and compiles are great when you've got one system to support, but that just doesn't work when you're trying to support several hundred systems.

We have to look at what is the best solution for ALL of the systems at the same time, not just what solution would work best for one particular system.

Lee

Re:SuSE

[mz2]

That's a bit trollish. SUSE's own binary repository plus the contrib repo is vast, it's really hard to find packages that aren't included. And there are other unofficial repositories if you're not happy with SUSE's.

Besides, by principle, I can't really see anything wrong with providing automatically dependency-aware installation tool with RPMs? That'not even any RH & SUSE specific approach. Especially when the one in SuSE works so well, I don't really see any reason to mock RPM-based packaging systems... And as everybody keeps repeating, it's not even proprietary at all.

Being well documented, stable and easy to use does not make SUSE a newbie distro. In fact, it's very much far from being _just_ an easy first glimpse into Linux.

Re:Lets see you do that for hundreds of systems

[clymere]

you make some very good points. I thought i was pretty specific in saying that Slackware was good "for me" and that Suse and Red Hat were not good "for me." If i was in charge of a large environment like that, i would certainly feel more pressure towards an RPM based distro, and honestly if it was a large school or business picking up the tab i'd probably even be inclined towards RH Enterprise. For my own personal workstation I find Slackware to be much more flexible AND usable than these others. For that matter, I also find support for Slackware to be BETTER than SuSE. I found precious little in SuSE's knowledge base for registered customers, and they have refused to endorse a forum on LinuxQuestions.com, citing their own as the reason why. I've found it much easier to find help with Slackware on IRC and places like LinuxQuestions then in scouring the net for help with SuSE. It has some nice tools. YaST certianly one of them. And Red Hat certainly has some great advantages in an enterprise environment, not the least of which is that if you're forking over a large amount of $$$, i'm sure support is much better. But for my personal use, I keep coming back to Slack. Its cheaper, easier, and the support for a single-user is quite frankly, better.

Worst version ever

[pottymouth]

I've been using various Linux distros since 1995 and I've never encountered such a buggy release!

Most of it could be blamed on KDE 3.2.1 but that IS the most common Suse window manager. Between not being able to log out without locking up the X-Server (and no, cntl+alt BS doesn't recover a console so you have to reset or log in remotely) and the DHCP client refusing to allow KDE to load I think I've effectively demonstrated why we wouldn't want to use Linux at my company. I've been trying to get management to give it a try for years and now, this one experience, will effectively negate my efforts.

I know that not using KDE or installing a later, less buggy, release is simple. But the suites don't and the fact that an install that should take 1/2 day took 3 days is all they see. What the hell happened at Suse? I've never had this kind of trouble with an install.

Can anybody help me fix my SuSE 9.1 sound problem?

[HenryKoren]

I have an onboard intel 810 AC97 sound card. Installed SuSE 9.1 via ISO. I started with a basic install, and everything worked fine with sound. Then I went to install the rest of the packages on the 5 CD's. After this... Sound was gone. The funny thing is that the sound card is still detected and it's module is loaded. Also, the mixer works, because I can turn up the microphone and get feedback. But NO SOUND other than that.

I spent hours trying to probe sound modules, reconfigure ALSA, reload my sound card drivers, etc. to no avail.

Like a confused windows user, my last resort was to re-install the opperating system. I did so, and it worked fine, until I installed the rest of the available packages. Then: Silence.

I'm about to shit-can SuSE because of this. It's unfortunate that this OS isn't ready for your average Joe Blow computer user because of critical problems like these.

-Henry

Upgrade issues...not really...

[AetherBurner]

I have SuSE 9.1. Yes, many packages are out there on the distro disks that I use but I have upgraded many just by using YaST to remove the SuSE package and then installed the updated package. No big deal. It is just as easy as doing an uninstall/install package in Whinedo$e. The process is just as easy as you want to make it. I can think of worse things that this...fixing a messed-up registry.

Re:Suse is not free

[zurab]

I remember that vendors like Cheapbytes and other CD burning houses were not able to sell SuSE as an unoffical CD since ironically enough the license on YaST forbid anyone but SuSE for charging for the software. Now with this restriction gone couldn't vendors just master there own unoffical CD's from the FTP packages.

I can't imagine why this was a problem even before the YaST "restriction." Why couldn't Cheapbytes or anybody else create a YaST-compatible package CDs/DVD of free software that would work with the downloadable SUSE install ISO? SUSE's install CD itself is only about 20MB which even dial-up users could download and burn, and then have a few GB extra software for use by YaST.

I don't think it would have been that hard to do. Am I missing something?